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Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Those Wacky.... Cherokees?!!

UPDATE

## UPDATE##Well, the soup thickens. After a Supreme Court ordered recount this past Saturday night, July 16, Principal Chief Chad Smith is once again in the lead, leading the challenger Baker by 5 votes.Why don't they just do a whole new ballot?Here's why: there's not an honest, unbribed election official left for one thing, & money talksfor another.

TAHLEQUAH, Okla. -- Cherokee Nation election commissioners will begin a second recount Saturday in the close and hotly contested election for the leader of Oklahoma's largest American Indian tribe.

Results from the June 25 election have been in dispute since they were announced the morning after. Unofficial results showed longtime councilman Bill John Baker winning by 11 votes, but when the Cherokee Nation Election Commission announced its official results the next day it said Principal Chief Chad Smith had won a fourth term by seven votes.

A June 30 recount ended with Baker up by 266 votes, but the tribe's highest court ordered another recount Tuesday.

There are about 300,000 Cherokees, making it Oklahoma's largest tribe and one of the biggest in the nation. The chief inaugurated Aug. 14 will administer a $600 million annual tribal budget. (this factoid must be important fer some reason....)

The recount that put Baker ahead was done by hand, and Smith complained that a number of ballots weren't counted. He filed a request for another tally, which the Cherokee Supreme Court ordered after visiting Election Commission offices and counting envelopes that carried the ballots. The second recount also will be done by hand.

Baker had argued Cherokee law prohibited another recount.

Witnesses at a Supreme Court hearing said it appeared most of the problems could be traced to absentee ballots. Many Cherokees eligible to vote in the election live outside Oklahoma.

You don't say~~!!

Smith either nominated or re-nominated the justices who heard the election case, and Baker, as a councilman, voted for four of them.Smith maintains that 273 absentee ballots were missing in totals from the first recount. In court documents, he noted that the number of absentee ballots counted on June 25 was 6,143, but that number dropped to 5,870 on June 30. Smith also claimed 298 ballots were "baselessly" rejected and nearly 150 voters who weren't Cherokee Nation citizens got their votes counted anyway.